OK so now you know the qualities of an effective research paper.
But how do you make your paper compelling?
And the first thing that I would recommend you look at is your research question.
You can make your research a lot stronger simply by fine tuning your research question before you even
started writing.
So suppose that your findings are not exactly what you want them to be.... which is very often right? And
that you just can't give a compelling answer to your question.
In that case, I recommend that you ask yourself: which question CAN you answer?
Or put differently, what conclusion CAN you draw from your findings? And the conclusion that you CAN draw
should determine your research question.
So let me give you an example for that. I once conducted a research project in social psychology and
I was interested in the question whether when we look at another person's face we automatically judge
how trustworthy that person looks based on the face.
So for example, most people when they look at Elia Wood have the feeling that he looks relatively trustworthy.
But most people if they look at Jack Nicholson get the feeling that he doesn't look trustworthy at all.
And my research question was: do people make these judgments automatically when they look at another
person's face?
So I conducted some research to answer that question.
And when I presented my research to my colleagues they said: "You cannot conclude from your findings
that people automatically form trustworthiness impressions from faces."
And I realized that they were right.
And so there was no point in arguing for me.
And so what we did instead is: we changed the research question. Because we realized that even though
we cannot conclude that people form these impressions AUTOMATICALLY, we can conclude that people form
them SPONTANEOUSLY.
And the difference is that when I say "automatic", I mean that people do it kind of without thinking about
it; without making the conscious decision to form these impressions while what my research really showed
is that people do it
but we don't really know HOW they do it: whether it's something automatic or whether it's their conscious
decision to do it.
And so by changing the word "automatic" to "spontaneous" we accounted for that limitation.
And once we changed the research question to whether people SPONTANEOUSLY form trustworthiness impressions
from faces, I never heard the same criticism again.
So one of the most powerful things you can do before you even start writing is to fine tune your research
question so that you can give a compelling answer.
And when you do that you will typically have to balance between two things. On the one hand, you want
to keep your question interesting but on the other hand you want to be able to give a compelling answer.
And as a rule of thumb, the more interesting the question is the harder it is to give a compelling answer.
And the goal should be to find the sweet spot where your question is still interesting but you're also
able to give a compelling answer.
All right.
So the key lessons of this lecture are: 1. To make your research compelling
choose a research question that fits to your findings.
2. Try to find a balance between making your question interesting and you answer compelling.
All right.
I see you in the next lecture.